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"Esthetics is to art what ornithology is to the birds," quips Barnett Newman. On the contrary, too many modern painters seem to listen first and paint afterward, to be guided by the art theory of others rather than an art instinct of their own. The turnover is so fast that a style is lucky to last more than a couple of years before it is pronounced dead by the critics. With such a declaration, many a collector decides that he had better unload, prices decline, and artists get despondent. More in anger than in jest, Painter Jimmy Ernst ticked off an "unhappy proliferation" of present and possibly future styles: "Op and pop, sop (soft-edge-optical), plop-plop (from catsup bottles), abrev (abstract revisionism), exab (express-abstraction), geopimp (geometric-post-impressionism), kipab (kinetic-pcst-abstraction), syncromesh (easy to shift), nero (new eroticism), and perhaps even esthex (esthetic experiments between consenting adults in the privacy of their home).
All this provides no answer to the question, what is art? The artists' own attitude in general is a questioning, as in science, rather than an affirmation, as in humanism. Being heretics with no common cause, rebelling against a permissive society with no settled faith of its own, they often seem driven into intellectual dead ends or fragmented tantrums of defiance, fighting unseen gusts that are perhaps not there. It is hard to be different among crowds of other people trying to be different. In the Dada decade, Marcel Duchamp could shock people by exhibiting a urinal turned upside down and calling it Fountain. Seeing it for the first time today, hardly anvone would flinch—although a few might try to flush.
If art no longer shocks, it seldom edifies. Gone is the romantic reverence that made a work of art an object of worship; now it is apt to be just a household object, a neatly executed artifact. Is that enough? "If a painting does not make a human contact, it is nothing," says Motherwell. "The audience also is responsible. Through pictures, our passions touch; therefore painting is the fulfillment of a deep human necessity, not a production of a handmade commodity. A painting, or a man, is neither a decoration nor an anecdote."
Duty to Judge